Friday, July 22, 2016

How To Increase Your Reading of Books

There is an old saying in the writing community:
Writers are readers. As I child in the summers, I hung out in
my local library and read stacks of biographies. That early experience shaped my
continuing love of reading biographies. While
I love to read, as an acquisitions editor, I have a lot of material coming my
direction. I often say that being an acquisitions editor is like trying to drink
water from a fire hose. The volume of information coming my direction is
staggering. As
a part of being an editor, I'm always looking to see if the writer is reading
the type of material that they are pitching to me. For example, if you are a
novelist and writing romance (the largest genre), I'm probably going to ask if
you read romances. And if you don't that tells me something about your knowledge
(or lack of knowledge) about the genre that you want to publish.

In
recent months, I've greatly increased the amount of books that I'm reading
through audio books. In particular, I'm using Overdrive on my smartphone. Overdrive is a free app
that I downloaded on my phone and it is tied to your local library. You can
check out the audio book from your library for 21 days then download the entire
book on your phone. Now that I have the complete book on my phone, I can use it
anywhere. I listen to the book while I walk on the treadmill. Because of
Bluetooth, I listen to the same book in my car—even when I drive a short
distance. Recently I've been traveling and I've listened to these audio books in
the airport or on the airplane. Almost always I have my phone and have access to
the audio book. You
can have different library cards on Overdrive. Each library has purchased
different books so you can access a different selection. Currently I have three
library cards and recently drove into Denver to get a Denver Public Library Card
because they have a larger selection of books on Overdrive. Like any library,
Overdrive has a wide variety of books—fiction and nonfiction.I
listen to a great deal of nonfiction—business books, biography, memoir and
how-to books. You can see many of these books just checking this
location on Goodreads. After I listen to the audio book, I will write a short review and
post it on Goodreads and Amazon. This regular practice doesn't take much time but
increases the number of reviews I write because of the increased number of books I've been consuming. Are you using audio books to increase the number of
books that you “read?” Tell me about your experiences in the comments
below.Tweetable:Discover How to Increase Your Reading. Ideas at: (ClickToTweet)________W. Terry
Whalin is an acquisitions editor at Morgan James
Publishing. He has written more than 60 books for traditional publishers and
his work has appeared in more than 50 print publications. As a frustrated
acquisitions editor, Terry wrote Book Proposals That
Sell, 21 Secrets to Speed Your Success, which has over 130 Five Star
Amazon reviews. Get the book exclusively at this link. He
has over 180,000 twitter
followers and blogs about The Writing Life.